World Cup 2022 (Soccer)

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      Chile Loses Appeal Seeking Ecuador’s Place in World Cup

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      A FIFA panel reaffirmed an earlier decision dismissing Chile’s claim that its rival fielded an ineligible player. Chile plans one last appeal.Chile failed Friday in its latest attempt to have its South American rival Ecuador thrown out of soccer’s World Cup, another setback in a high-stakes campaign that threatened to alter the field for the sport’s showcase championship only two months before the tournament’s opening match.An appeals committee at soccer’s governing body, FIFA, rejected Chile’s newest claim, agreeing with an earlier decision by a disciplinary panel to reject the contention that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player in several qualification matches. The FIFA appeals panel provided few details on how it reached its decision, though it said the fact that the player, Byron Castillo, holds permanent Ecuadorean citizenship as justification for siding with the original verdict in the case.Chile contends that Castillo, a 23-year-old defender, was not only born in Colombia but also that he is three years older than stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Chilean officials said they would make one final attempt to overturn the decision, and strip Ecuador of its place in the tournament, by appealing to the final arbiter of sports disputes, the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.The fight over the eligibility of Castillo, who plays professionally in Mexico, has for months generated uncertainty over Ecuador’s place at the World Cup, which opens in November. One of four qualifiers from South America, Ecuador is scheduled to face host Qatar in the tournament’s opening game on Nov. 20.Chile, which filed the appeal that also required Peru’s federation to make a submission, has for weeks fought a public battle to denounce Ecuador and Castillo. Under FIFA rules, fielding an ineligible player could result in a forfeit of any match in which that player took part.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.A New Flash Point: An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights with rainbow armbands during the World Cup could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.Ecuador finished fourth in South America’s qualifying competition, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup. But Chile had demanded that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo appeared, and that its opponents in those matches be granted three points per game. That outcome, Chilean officials had calculated, would rearrange the qualifying results in South America and lift Chile into fourth place, and into the World Cup, at Ecuador’s expense.To support its claim that Castillo should not have been allowed to play for Ecuador, Chilean officials scoured public records and social media posts and hired media consultants in Europe to keep attention focused on its case, and its claims. Chile’s federation, meanwhile, sent to FIFA registry documents, including birth certificates and other evidence — even paperwork that, it said, proved where and when Castillo was baptized.Only days before the appeal hearing, Chilean officials also secured an audio recording from a 2018 investigation in which Castillo appeared; in it, the player seemed to confirm details of his early life in Colombia. That recording was then published by news media.A FIFA disciplinary committee had rejected the claims against Castillo and Ecuador in June, but the organization’s rules allowed Chile to make its case anew to an appeals body. The hearing took place via video conference on Thursday but Castillo did not take part even though he had been required to join.“The footballing world heard a player who helped Ecuador qualify for the FIFA World Cup admit he was born in Colombia and that he gained an Ecuadorean passport using false information,” said Jorge Yungue, the general secretary of the Chilean soccer federation. “No wonder he refused to participate.”“What does it say about appeal committee that, confronted with all this, still they fail to act?” he added in a statement that confirmed Chile’s intention to go to CAS.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years. A wider investigation into player registrations in Ecuador looked into hundreds of cases and resulted in punishments for at least 75 youth players found to have falsified records. Wary of a mistake that might jeopardize Ecuador’s World Cup hopes this year, officials from its national soccer federation had held off on selecting Castillo for the senior national team until this year.Two years ago, in fact, the president of a special investigation commission convened by the federation appeared to suggest Castillo was Colombian, something that Chilean officials said they had substantiated. Ecuador’s federation finally selected Castillo for the national team after his nationality was recognized and formalized by judicial bodies in that country.For FIFA, the lingering case has been an additional burden as it grapples with ongoing concerns about the preparedness for Qatar to stage the World Cup. It got an assist from Ecuador in August, when the country’s soccer federation agreed to a request that its game be moved a day earlier so that Qatar could play in the tournament opener on a day free of other matches. More

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      Our Interview With Kylian Mbappé: Audio Excerpts

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      ‘I’m Going to Stay a Player’0:40Mbappé’s new contract has given him a new status and importance at P.S.G. But that also gave rise to reports that he now has the power to hire and fire coaches, or otherwise shape the direction of the club and its roster.That’s just not true, he told us. More

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      What the Champions League Is Lacking

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      Europe’s richest competition offers the best of what soccer can deliver. But the World Cup still has something it can’t match.PARIS — There will be stories, of course. There are always stories. The Champions League delivers them so frequently and so reliably that it is impossible to dismiss the nagging suspicion that all of this might just be scripted, the product of some complex simulation being run from a secret lair in Nyon.Robert Lewandowski, clad in the blue and red of Barcelona, will return to Bayern Munich, only a few weeks after forcing his exit. Manchester City’s visit to Borussia Dortmund will see Erling Haaland standing once more before its Yellow Wall, that great force of nature no longer at his back but marshaled in his face.And there will be scenes, too. Real Madrid, the reigning and apparently perennial European champion, will walk out at Celtic Park and wince at the roar of a place that impressed Lionel Messi so much that he keeps a Celtic jersey at home as a memento, an atmosphere described by Xavi Hernández as “incomparable,” an arena where the host’s winning so much as a corner generated a noise that made Antonio Conte think “the stadium was falling down.”That is what the Champions League does best, after all. Like its great contemporary, the Premier League, the competition is as much an iconographical phenomenon as a sporting one. Even in those years — not so long ago, even now — when its product was more noted for its caution, its risk aversion, its brutalist cynicism, its appeal endured because of the way it was packaged.The searing lights, the swelling music and the packed stands across Europe all serve as immediately comprehensible prompts to observers and participants alike. They denote that what is unfolding is the pinnacle of the sport, the only thing that matters, the indisputable main event.Real Madrid, last year’s champion, and Manchester City are back where both feel they belong.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd yet, for the first time in three decades, that may not be true this year. This season’s Champions League will be a staccato one. The first two months of the tournament will bring a great rush of fixtures, six rounds of games played in nine breathless weeks, the only breather coming in the form of an unwelcome and, on some level, somewhat greedy international break.Then the competition that has spent 30 years establishing itself as the unquestioned and unrivaled summit of the game — the place where the sport’s cutting edge is sharpened, where new ideas bubble and sizzle, where players put their talent to the ultimate test — will be suspended in uneasy hibernation, put begrudgingly on hold from November until February.Reluctantly, the Champions League — and the constellation of Europe’s great clubs who have come to regard it as their objective and birthright — will cede the limelight to the World Cup: five prime weeks in the middle of the season handed over to international soccer, that anachronism of a bygone age, glossy club soccer’s unwelcome, ugly cousin.There is no shortage of reasons for club soccer to resent this intrusion: the financial ramifications of losing those weeks of television real estate; the potential risk of injury to players paid not by their national associations but by the clubs; the sense that the engine of the sport is being forced to stall so that the hood can be polished.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.But greater than all those, perhaps, is the unhappy reminder that, while the Champions League is the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet, it is only the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet. The qualifier — “club” — tells a story of its own. For all the money, for all the power, for all the stories and the scenes, the World Cup is still the biggest show in town.It is worth pausing to reflect on why that might be; after all, it does not fit neatly with what we assume modern consumers — sorry, fans — want from sports. As discussed in this space a couple of weeks ago, audiences are drawn to soccer games by two factors in particular: the familiarity of the brands — sorry, teams — involved, and the stakes for which they are playing.The World Cup, like the Champions League, delivers both in spades. There is no brand recognition quite like being a nation state, with your own seat at the United Nations and history of governmental corruption and fully equipped army, obviously. And there is no tournament quite so doused in risk as the World Cup, in which one misstep can waste four years’ work.In every other aspect, though, the World Cup comes up short. It cannot match the Champions League for prize money, or for star power — Haaland, like Mohamed Salah and the noted nation state of Italy, will be absent from Qatar — or, most crucial, for quality. The Champions League, now, is where the finest soccer in the world is played. The World Cup, by contrast, is pockmarked by flaws.That is unavoidable, of course. If Manchester City lacks a striker, it can go out and buy the best one it can find. Spain, as it has helpfully proved over the last several years, does not have that luxury. Like everyone else, it has to make do and mend. Its coach does not have the opportunity of endless training sessions to hone a system that might accentuate the team’s strengths and disguise its weaknesses; a few days is all that is available.And yet, still, the World Cup possesses the quality of a Black Hole; it draws in the light from even the brightest stars around it. The first phase of the Champions League, like the early rounds of domestic soccer, will have the feel of an appetizer, for fans and players. Games will be played with an awareness that nobody wants to miss the main course.Qatar, where World Cup grass and World Cup anticipation are growing.Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat, perhaps, suggests the World Cup has something that the Champions League does not. That could be rarity: the fact that even the finest players might get only three shots at going to a World Cup when they can reasonably expect a dozen or so tilts at the Champions League trophy. It could be the jeopardy that is, for now, threaded into its structure. It could be good, old-fashioned patriotic fervor.Or it might be mystery. It may be the flaws themselves that make the World Cup so appealing. It could be that the tournament’s appeal is linked to the fact that Spain could turn up and win it or be eliminated in the group stage; that France, despite the quantity of its quality, could be eliminated on penalties by Switzerland; that South Korea can beat Germany and still not qualify for the knockout rounds.The Champions League has, over the years, lost all of that uncertainty. Every year, it feels more like a parade of the inevitable. There will be stories and there will be scenes this season, as there are every season, but they will be rooted in the same inequality that means it is already possible to be pretty certain of the identity of at least a dozen or so of the teams that will make the round of 16.The same cannot be said of the World Cup. None of the teams are perfect — none of them can be — and so the playing field is more level. The teams that do benefit from a disparity of resources do not have the safety net of five more group games, or a second leg, or the prospect of the transfer market.It is the flaws of the teams in the World Cup that make its appeal unrivaled. It is the uncertainty that they bring that make it the main event. It is the unpredictability that generates what the Champions League lacks, and what it might like to consider trying to capture once more.The Death of the Group of DeathThe Champions League groups for 2022-23.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThere are, now, two types of Champions League groups. One features two heavy favorites, two teams whose seasons will be defined by how deep they can advance into the competition — Paris St.-Germain and Juventus, for example — and two comparative makeweights, in the form of Benfica, say, and Maccabi Haifa.These groups are something of a tease. The way UEFA draws the groups means that the eye is drawn to those first two names. P.S.G. and Juventus, you think: a clash of the titans. There will be genuine jeopardy here. This sensation lasts as long as it takes the observer to remember that two teams qualify from each pool, and so the games between the two resident superpowers may, in fact, mean nothing at all.The second sort of group is more interesting. Thanks to the quirks of the seeding system, these feature just one putative contender — Liverpool, despite its early-season form, or Chelsea, say — and three relatively evenly matched opponents: Ajax, Napoli and Rangers, or A.C. Milan, Red Bull Salzburg and (at a push) Dinamo Zagreb.Welcome to the big stage (for now), Viktoria Plzen.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockIn this scenario, too, the superpower invariably makes it through — that is the nature of the modern Champions League, in which we all spend an awful lot of time making sure that the thing that always happens will, in fact, happen again — but it is generally with a lower points total and a degree of gratitude that their rivals all managed to beat each other.The sole exception to this rule of two groups comes on those occasions when there is a third kind: when one team in a group is notably weaker than all three of its opponents. That dubious honor, this year, falls to Viktoria Plzen, the Czech champion, drawn to face Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.There are eight groups in this year’s Champions League. This is the only one that does not fit the pattern. This is the only one that is not wholly predictable, that might just about be described as a Group of Death, and even that is only because it is impossible to be entirely sure how secure in itself this new vision of Barcelona might be. In ordinary years, even a club as famous as Inter would find itself succumbing to the inevitable, and European soccer would be facing up to the prospect of a fall without any jeopardy at all.CorrespondenceThanks to Jon Gilbert, first of all, for performing that most valuable of services: holding me to account for my attempt last week to hold Gary Neville to account.“Neville was railing against Glazer parsimony,” Jon wrote. “But that was nothing to do with buying players. Neville was apoplectic at the complete lack of investment in club infrastructure. He was hugely upset about the state of Old Trafford, now a leaky rust bucket. The club lacks a leading training facility, the lack of a sporting director has stifled progress and a soccer-competent leadership team is desperately needed.”The last couple of points were, I think, raised by last week’s newsletter, but I’ll concede the former: Neville was speaking more broadly than simply complaining that United should lavish more money in the transfer market. The decline of Old Trafford, in fact, is a pretty handy metaphor for the club as a whole: It still draws the crowds and rakes in the cash, but it is trading on memory.Manchester United beat Liverpool on Monday, righting its ship for a day.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA question, too, from Phil Friedman, soliciting an expansion to the suggestion that some revised version of the European Super League makes more sense for other teams from the continent than it does for the denizens of the Premier League. “Not sure I understand this thought,” Phil noted, which indicates a failure on my part to communicate with sufficient clarity.My logic — which may, caveat emptor, be faulty — is that the Premier League’s supremacy is now ensconced; its broadcasting income will continue to spiral, and so its teams essentially have no need to seek a more glamorous competition elsewhere. Indeed, you could argue that the Premier League will become a sort of de facto Super League anyway, with every other domestic competition in Europe feeding into it.For the elites of Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and potentially others) the only conceivable challenge to that hegemony is to join forces. A league not just boasting Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris St.-Germain and Juventus but also drawing on the combined populations of the countries they call home would, I suspect, be able to generate revenues that can match those on offer in England, allowing those clubs to gain access to the fortunes they so evidently believe they deserve.That is certainly not to say its advent would be welcome, of course. Regional leagues are an idea I can get behind; losing the variety offered by each domestic tournament would be a shame. It is just that, from my vantage point, it has a certain inevitability about it, even allowing for the fatal flaw in any proposed Super League: the fact that someone would have to finish bottom. More

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      World Cup Worries Mount With 100 Days (Give or Take) to Go

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      A last-minute request to change the tournament’s start date is only the latest bit of uncertainty surrounding soccer’s showcase event.At a flashy ceremony on Nov. 21 last year, some of Qatar’s most senior officials, including the Gulf nation’s prime minister, joined the FIFA president Gianni Infantino, top soccer executives and invited guests for a celebration. They gathered on Doha’s corniche, the sweeping promenade that hugs the city’s shimmering waterfront, to unveil an ornate countdown clock and to mark a milestone: the day they were celebrating was precisely one year before the opening of the 2022 World Cup.Infantino, who now resides in Qatar, offered exultant praise for his hosts. He said their preparations for the event — roughly $200 billion in investments since Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2010 — were beyond compare: So good, in fact, that Infantino, a veteran soccer administrator, declared that he had “never witnessed anything like what is happening here.”Infantino’s bullish language might now better describe something few in soccer have seen before: the state of uncertainty and rising concern that surrounds several elements of the tournament affecting fans, sponsors and broadcasters. Not least of them? The day the World Cup will actually begin.World Cup organizers this week made an unprecedented request to reschedule the start date of the tournament in order to give Qatar, as the host, pride of place in the opening match. They asked for a ruling by Thursday, only months before the tournament and a matter of hours before a series of events marking 100 days to kickoff is set to begin.FIFA President Gianni Infantino was asked only this week to approve a change to the World Cup schedule.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersThe request to play the first match on Nov. 20 — a day earlier than previously announced — is expected to be approved. But moving the date of the opening game, and shifting the kickoff time of another match the next day, will disrupt plans made by teams, fans, sponsors and broadcasters and even the tournament’s marketing staff, which has spent millions of dollars buying advertising space around the world to mark the 100-day countdown to the World Cup — a day now cloaked in questions — in signage wrapping buses and taxis in major capital cities around the world. All of those campaigns, as of Thursday, could now launch with the wrong start date for the tournament.The late schedule change, though, is only the latest high profile question that is adding to a growing air of uncertainty, inside and outside Qatar’s World Cup organization, about the ability of the tiny gulf nation — the smallest ever to host the World Cup — to pull off a tournament for which organizers have had 12 years to prepare.Three months before the tournament, for example, Qatar has yet to unveil concrete plans about the kind of experience fans can expect during their visits, including what they will need to enter the country; where they will stay when they arrive; how the police will handle violations of Qatari laws about public behavior; and where and how fans will be able to consume alcoholic beverages in Qatar, a conservative Muslim country where the sale of alcohol is tightly controlled and where the public consumption of it is almost nonexistent.London cabs decorated to mark 100 days until the start of the World Cup. The date on the door, though, soon may be wrong.How the tournament — with more than one million visitors expected to visit — will be secured also still has not been articulated. Qatar has signed policing agreements with several nations, notably Turkey, which in January said it would be providing more than 3,000 security personnel, including riot police, for a tournament in which fans of the 32 competing nations — some of them bitter rivals — will rub shoulders for weeks in an area smaller than the state of Connecticut.Read More on the 2022 World CupA Last-Minute Change: Only months before the tournament, FIFA is considering a request for the event to start one day earlier, allowing Qatar to be featured in the first match.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.Unofficially, Qatari officials have said the imported security officers will not be in direct contact with fans. But so far — and unlike for previous World Cups — scant detail on that matter, and several others, has been publicly available. Asked two days ago for clarification on questions about several World Cup topics, Qatari officials have yet to respond.There have also been concerns about accommodations, with delays in the release of rooms to the public and fans reporting a lack of availability on a portal reserved for ticket-holders, who are expected to be the only foreigners who will be allowed to enter Qatar during the monthlong World Cup. (This guidance, too, remains unclear as of this week.)Those who have managed to find accommodations, which can only be booked after fans have paid for tickets, have complained about high prices even in the rare cases where they have found availability.Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella organization of fan groups, said the numbers of official fan groups traveling to Qatar to support European teams most likely will be significantly lower than for the last World Cup, which was held in Russia. The defending World Cup champion France, in one example, expects only 100 fans to attend as part of its official supporters group.Other fan groups, Evain said, are considering flying in and out of Qatar for matches because they have concluded doing so would be cheaper, and easier, than staying in Qatar. Germany’s fan club has already said it will be commuting to games from Dubai. “I don’t think they realize how problematic their accommodation situation is,” Evain said. “The whole system to book accommodation is so unclear ticket-holders are reluctant to book.”At the same time, representatives of some participating teams are discovering that finding space for players to socialize outside of their hotels in such a small geographic area has been an issue. “I don’t know if they get out of the hotel, they will be surrounded with thousands of fans,” said Iva Olivari, the team manager for Croatia.“I cannot tell you exactly what we are facing,” she added. “We will have to deal with it when we get there.”Warning: World Cup timing is, for now, not set in stone. Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor FIFA’s partners, the continuing uncertainty has been an unrelenting challenge. The last-ditch plan to change the tournament’s start date in particular will create chaos for the plans crafted months in advance by sponsors, according to Ricardo Fort, the former longtime sports marketing head at Coca-Cola.“They invited and confirmed hospitality guests, booked flights and hotels, and contracted with all necessary logistics,” Fort wrote in a Twitter post. “Imagine changing it all!”Officials in Qatar’s organizing committee have by now gotten used to such last-minute and sometimes inexplicable revisions to plans that were months in the making. In 2019, for example, staff members who had prepared a detailed marketing and communication plan to announce the opening of what was to be the al-Wakrah stadium were stunned to discover — only minutes before the country’s emir arrived to open the venue — that he had taken to social media to say it would instead be called the al-Janoub stadium.At other times, Qatar and its ambassadors have been their own worst enemies. Asked on a call with reporters last year about how many migrant workers have died on construction projects, a question that organizers have faced since work first began on World Cup projects almost a decade ago, Nasser al-Khater, the chief executive of the organizing committee, appeared to guess at the number before being corrected by a staff member. In April, World Cup officials had to provide clarifications after a senior security official told a reporter that rainbow flags, a symbol of gay rights, could be seized from fans for their own protection.To help tell its story, Qatar also enlisted — at great expense — a group of former soccer players, most prominent among them David Beckham, the former England captain. But despite receiving millions of dollars to bless Qatar’s World Cup project with his fame, Beckham has proved to be a reluctant advocate, preferring to attend events only when the news media is not present. Beckham has never said publicly why he signed up to endorse the tournament, and his spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.This week brought a new crisis over the tournament’s start date. FIFA’s secretary general, in the letter sent to top soccer leaders requesting the change, said FIFA had assessed the commercial and legal effects of moving Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador forward one day and “determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposal.”Some fans, though, will be left disappointed. In addition to shifting Qatar’s game, FIFA also proposed moving the time of a game between Netherlands and Senegal set for the original opening day, Nov. 21, to an evening kickoff from its original afternoon start.Martín Bauzá, a New Yorker, said that would mean he could no longer use the tickets he has bought for the Netherlands game, because he also has tickets for the United States-Wales match that begins an hour after it ends. And he probably will not be the only one grumbling.“I would imagine it would cause a few headaches for broadcasters,” said Graham Fry, chairman of IMG’s production unit, a veteran of major event coverage.“They would have already planned programming for that day, scheduled previews for the World Cup,” he added, noting such decisions often must be made months in advance.Another issue of direct interest to many fans — the plan to serve alcohol at the World Cup — has still not been articulated, despite months of discussions and even though one of FIFA’s biggest partners is Budweiser, which expects its products to be available to supporters across World Cup sites.The most recent proposal, which has yet to be made public, is for beer to be sold after the security check outside stadiums but not inside the stadiums themselves. Fans also will be able to drink at fan parks, but at the moment that privilege will only be available at certain times of the day. Which times? World Cup organizers still have not said. More

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      FIFA Seeks Late Changes to Qatar World Cup Schedule

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      In a letter sent only months before the tournament, organizers have requested that the World Cup start one day earlier and allow Qatar, the host nation, to feature in its first match.Qatar has had 12 years to plan for the World Cup. Now, with the first games of the tournament just over 100 days away and the intricate match schedule announced months ago, organizers have requested changes that would make the event start a day earlier so the host nation can have a featured place in the opening game.In recent years, the World Cup host nation has appeared in the tournament’s first match, as the headliner in the monthlong event’s elaborate opening ceremony. But this year, in a break with that tradition, organizers took the unusual step of scheduling Qatar’s first game as the third of four matches on a busy first day of competition on Nov. 21.Now a proposal to move Qatar’s game to Nov. 20 has been sent to the most senior officials of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of the World Cup. Those officials, a group that includes the leaders of soccer’s six global confederations and the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, will decide whether to approve it.It is unclear why organizers — and FIFA — had not originally planned for Qatar to play in the tournament’s opening game, a stage reserved for every tournament host since the World Cup was staged in Germany in 2006. Before then, the defending champion was customarily granted the honor of opening the tournament.“It has been a longstanding tradition to mark the start of the FIFA World Cup with an opening ceremony on the occasion of the first match featuring either the hosts or the defending champions, a factor that is considered to have significant value from a ceremonial, cultural and commercial point of view,” FIFA wrote in a letter to members of the bureau that was reviewed by The New York Times.The Lusail stadium, the largest of the eight arenas built or renovated for the World Cup, is set to host 10 matches, including the final.Pawel Kopczynski/ReutersIn addition to changing the date of Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador, the proposed adjustment would affect another match set for the tournament’s opening day: Senegal’s game against the Netherlands, which would be moved out of its afternoon time slot into an evening window.Planning for the Qatar World Cup has been bumpy. Granting the hosting rights to Qatar eventually required FIFA to move the event to the Northern Hemisphere’s winter because the searing summer temperatures in the Gulf were deemed to pose a potential health risk to players, officials and the hundreds of thousands of fans expected at the tournament.The switch has upended the soccer calendar, leading to an unprecedented midseason interruption to the European league season and other competitions around the world. Negotiations with clubs — furious about the weekslong disruptions to their league schedules and television contracts — resulted in the tournament’s being played in fewer days (28) than any other event since it was expanded to 32 teams in 1998.“As the tournament approaches, the FIFA administration is now fully aware of the various sporting, operational, commercial and legal implications of this uniquely compressed schedule,” FIFA wrote in its letter.FIFA told officials that it would like them to approve the change by Thursday evening European time.The sudden push to change the date of the opening game has only added to concerns about Qatar’s readiness to stage the World Cup. Already fans are complaining about a shortage of accommodations and a lack of clarity over the consumption of alcohol during the tournament.Should the switch of the opening match be approved, overseas ticket-holders who had planned to attend would face the potential challenge of changing their travel plans and rebooking hotel rooms, and any players competing in European leagues — Ecuador at times has more than a dozen — would have one fewer day to travel and prepare.The plan has already caused disquiet among ticket holders, with the proposed changes making some combinations of games all but impossible for visitors to attend. New York-based Martín Bauzá told The Times he had secured tickets for the game between Senegal and the Netherlands and the United States opener with Wales later that day. FIFA switching Senegal’s game to the later slot means he would not be able to attend both games, with the second game starting an hour after the first ends.“I did purchase Senegal/Netherlands specifically because of the time difference between matches and in accordance with the FIFA ticket rules that require 4 hours between matches (i.e., cannot purchase tickets to back to back matches) which is now the scenario I will have to deal with,” Bauzá said in a message.World Cup organizers said they had consulted with Qatar and the soccer associations of the two affected teams before proposing the change. Its letter suggested neither national team objected to the change.Separately, a FIFA appeals committee is considering an appeal by Chile to throw Ecuador out of the World Cup over accusations that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player. Several Ecuadorean players based in Europe would only have six days to prepare for the tournament, fewer than any others involved in the World Cup.“The FIFA administration has assessed the commercial and legal implications of the proposal — including the impact on contractual commitments across media rights, sponsorship, and ticketing and hospitality — as well as the impact on traveling fans, and has determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposals,” FIFA said in the letter. More

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      In Qatar’s World Cup Summer, the Mercury Rises and the Clock Ticks

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      DOHA, Qatar — The sun comes up before 5 a.m. and immediately puts the entire city on convection bake. By lunchtime, the temperature has finished its methodical climb up the scale, from unusual through uncomfortable to unbearable and then, finally, to unhealthy. The wind off the bay offers no relief; in June in Doha, even the summer breeze blows hot.This was to be the summer the World Cup came to Qatar, an idea that seems as preposterous now as it did a dozen years ago, when the tiny Gulf country, let’s just say, acquired the hosting rights to soccer’s biggest championship. FIFA’s own evaluators had labeled a summer World Cup in the Gulf as “high risk,” and a single morning’s walk this week confirmed that assessment. Still, for years, Qatari organizers promised to deliver what they had proposed, whatever FIFA asked: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for soccer.Organizers, of course, eventually came to their senses, or at least to that one sense that lets humans differentiate hot from sun’s anvil hot, and in 2015 moved the tournament to the winter. The past week, though, offered a glimpse of what might have been.Peru fans seeking shelter from the sun in the Souk Waqif, top, and a rare sight on the streets of Msheireb in midday: humans.Over eight days, Qatar hosted three intercontinental playoff games that determined the final two teams in the field for this year’s World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica. Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test-drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one’s perspective.Five months from the World Cup’s opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months. All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day. Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.Some Peru fans from California took their own World Cup trophy to Qatar. Their team, alas, won’t be going.World Cup messages dot plazas and open spaces across Doha. Qatar bid for a summer event, but will host in the winter instead.Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000 strong, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. Many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening, to sip coffees, to stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital’s rebuilt marketplace — filling its tables, disappearing into its warren of stalls and shops. But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they’d visit, one couldn’t help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.Organizers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup — 32 cheering sections, just like Peru’s, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colors and carrying their own hopes.The stadium in Lusail, Qatar’s largest venue, is equipped with individual cooling vents under each seat.A new turf field growing under artificial light at Lusail; different blends of grass are installed depending on the season.Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organizers. Qatar’s decision to require those attending the World Cup to have proof of a ticket purchase to enter the country or book a hotel room could help keep the numbers down. Saudis and Emiratis who love soccer could pour across the border to bring those numbers right back up. But the tournament also is four full days shorter than its predecessors in Brazil and Russia; if it turns into a chaotic mess, then at least it will be a shorter one.There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.The heat? That’s so low on Qatar’s list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops into the 80s by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.The World Cup stadium in Lusail is decorated with collages of photographs of the workers who built it.For others, the preparations rarely stop. Outdoor work is prohibited in the heat of the summer day.On game days it won’t have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia’s shootout win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius), even though it was still well over 90 degrees outside the stadium’s open roof and swirling metalwork shell.In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.To see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a work in progress rather than a completed vision. More

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      World Cup Will Allow Five Substitutes and Bigger Rosters

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      A rule change means coaches will for the first time have the option to make as many as five changes per game, and draw them from deeper benches.DOHA, Qatar — The use of extra substitutes in matches, a change to longstanding soccer tradition brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, was formally written into the sport’s rules on Monday, only five months before the start of this year’s World Cup in Qatar.Under the revision to soccer’s purposely brief rulebook, the Laws of the Game, approved by its rule-making body, the International Football Association Board, coaches at this year’s tournament — and in any other competition — will be allowed to use as many as five substitutes per game instead of three.The expansion already had been in place on a temporary basis, introduced in 2020 and framed as an effort to protect the physical and mental health of players. But it had been widely adopted in domestic leagues around the world and by top competitions like the Champions League, and praised by coaches who welcomed the tactical flexibility it offered. Chelsea Coach Thomas Tuchel, for example, called the change “brilliant” for big teams and small ones alike.Making it permanent sets the stage for another change: FIFA now can expand rosters for the tournament, to 26 players instead of the former limit of 23.Both of Monday’s decisions mean that, for the third straight cycle, the World Cup will kick off with a major rules change: Goal-line technology made its debut at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and the replay system known as video-assistant review was approved in time for the 2018 tournament in Russia.The use of five substitutes was approved by IFAB as a temporary measure in 2020. At the time, leagues were rushing back into a compressed schedules of matches — sometimes in the heat of midsummer, and without their customary preseasons — as they scrambled to make up games and fulfill multimillion-dollar television contracts.But the temporary measure has been retained in many of the world’s top leagues, and like their club colleagues, national team coaches — welcoming the flexibility and options the extra subs and bigger rosters will offer in the biggest event on the soccer calendar — are expected to agree with the change being made permanent.Club coaches may favor it, too, especially if it eases the strain on their top players even in modest ways: To accommodate the scorching summer heat in Qatar, this year’s World Cup was moved to the winter months, meaning it will arrive in the midst of most club seasons, and put an added hardship on elite players already weary from soccer’s nearly nonstop schedule since the game’s pandemic pause in 2020.Added substitutes are now common from Europe to leagues like Major League Soccer in the United States. The Premier League — which used five subs initially and then reverted to three subs the past two seasons, will make the change back to five beginning with its coming season.Expanded rosters are also not new. Europe’s governing body allowed teams to name 26-player rosters for last summer’s European Championship, and South American officials approved 28-man teams for last summer’s Copa América in Brazil. In those cases, coaches were still allowed to name only 23 players to their active rosters for each game. But the decision to allow gameday rosters to include 15 subs instead of 12 will give coaches wiggle room at the time when the coronavirus could still decimate a team in a matter of days. More

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      Chile pierde en su intento de sustituir a Ecuador en el Mundial

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      La federación chilena de fútbol argumentaba que Ecuador debía ser expulsado del torneo por utilizar un jugador no elegible durante la fase de clasificación. La FIFA no estuvo de acuerdo.El intento de Chile de expulsar a su rival sudamericano, Ecuador, de la Copa del Mundo fracasó el viernes, cuando un panel disciplinario del organismo rector del fútbol mundial rechazó un reclamo de que Ecuador había alineado a un jugador no elegible en varios partidos de clasificación.El caso giraba en torno al defensa Byron Castillo, que según Chile no solo había nacido en Colombia, sino que tenía tres años más de los que figuraban en los documentos que lo identificaban como ecuatoriano. La federación de fútbol chilena presentó documentos de registro, incluyendo certificados de nacimiento, que, según dijo, respaldaban su reclamación.De acuerdo con las normas de la FIFA, la alineación de un jugador no elegible puede dar lugar a la pérdida de cualquier partido en el que participe dicho futbolista.Ecuador quedó en cuarto lugar en las eliminatorias del continente, con lo que obtuvo una de las cuatro plazas de pase automático asignadas a Sudamérica para el Mundial. Pero Chile había exigido que Ecuador perdiera los ocho partidos de clasificación en los que participó Castillo, y que sus rivales en esos encuentros recibieran tres puntos por partido. Los funcionarios chilenos habían calculado que esa fórmula cambiaría los resultados de la clasificación en Sudamérica y llevaría a Chile al Mundial de Fútbol a expensas de Ecuador.La FIFA dijo que sus funcionarios habían analizado las presentaciones de todas las partes involucradas en el caso —que también involucró a Perú, país que competirá en una clasificatoria internacional el lunes por un pase a Catar— antes de concluir que Ecuador no tenía ningún caso que responder.Chile dijo que apelaría el fallo.“Estamos consternados con la decisión”, dijo Eduardo Carlezzo, abogado que representa a la federación chilena. “Es una enorme cantidad de pruebas, tanto de Colombia como de Ecuador, lo que demuestra sin ninguna duda que el jugador nació en Colombia. Por lo tanto, apelaremos y esperamos que esas evidencias sean consideradas en su totalidad”.La federación ecuatoriana de fútbol emitió un comunicado después de que Chile presentara su demanda en mayo, en el que rechazaba lo que calificaba de “infundados rumores” sobre Castillo, de quien dijo que era ciudadano ecuatoriano en el sentido jurídico y deportivo.“Rechazamos categóricamente cualquier intento de quienes pretenden evitar su participación en el Mundial de Fútbol de Catar 2022, la cual fue obtenida legítimamente en la cancha”, dijo entonces la federación.Los antecedentes de Castillo han sido cuestionados durante varios años, después de que una investigación más amplia sobre las inscripciones de jugadores en Ecuador analizó cientos de casos y dio lugar a sanciones para al menos 75 jugadores juveniles que se descubrió que habían falsificado sus documentos. Temerosos de un error que pudiera poner en peligro las esperanzas de Ecuador en la Copa del Mundo de este año, los responsables de su federación nacional de fútbol habían aplazado la incorporación de Castillo a la selección de mayores hasta este año.Hace dos años, de hecho, el presidente de una comisión especial de investigación convocada por la federación pareció sugerir que Castillo era colombiano, algo que los funcionarios chilenos argumentaron que habían corroborado. More